Afro-Pessimism, by this route, critically supplements the paradigm of critical ethnic studies in at least two ways: First, by moving conceptually from the empirical to the structural or, more precisely, from the experiential to the political ontological, especially insofar as the question of differential racialization—or the complexity of racial hierarchy—makes recourse to a comparative history and social science. Second, by reframing racism as a relation grounded in anti-blackness rather than white supremacy, or, more precisely, by pushing through the conceptual framework of racism altogether toward an apprehension of the world-historical transformation entailed in the emergence of racial slavery. The color line, as it were, operates here as the division of the world into regions of blackness and non-blackness, or slavery contrasted to forms of freedom including the possessive investment in whiteness, rather than whiteness and non-whiteness, or freedom as the possessive investment in whiteness contrasted with forms of unfreedom defined by its relative absence or prohibition.
In a related move, Afro-Pessimism seeks to decenter, without diminishing, the analysis of political economy by discerning the libidinal economy that underwrites and sutures its dynamics. And so, in its formulation of power, and particularly of the nature and role of violence, Afro-Pessimism does not only describe the operations of systems, structures and institutions, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the fantasies of murderous hatred and unlimited destruction, of sexual consumption and social availability that animate the realization of such violence. It is an analysis, in other words, of how anti-black fantasies attain objective value in the political and economic life of society and in the psychic life of culture as well. Wilderson ponders, with respect to the medium and institution of cinema: "Can film tell the story of a sentient being whose story can be neither recognized nor incorporated into Human civil society" (96)? We may ask too, can art, literature, music, theater, or, for that matter, theory?
